>> Washing hands is something that people are required to do as part of ablution for
prayers.
But washing hands after contact with is not a habit.
So, it's not something people do, they don't even see importance of doing it.
Most people just go into the latrine with a little bit of water for
anal cleansing and they come out and that's it.
So, it's not a habit,
it's not something that people will go out of their way to do.
Well, washing hands with soap is difficult for
people in an environment where water is a problem.
Washing hands with soap becomes a big issue for households,
especially when you look sometimes at some of the areas where we do our programming.
This is like a very dry country.
It's mostly deserts.
Water is a luxury.
Water is a scarce commodity.
So expecting especially children,
that mothers would allow children to play around with water, that's a no go area.
So it's not something that children are encouraged to do.
In fact, most households see it as a waste of water,
especially they have to walk long distances to get water.
The Ghana hand washing with soap initiative was a very successful
intervention.
It set out to make hand washing with soap the acceptable norm among people.
This was in, I think, 2001, 2003, in Ghana,
as part of the global public-private partnership for hand washing with soap.
And it was successful in that it was built on social markets and principles.
It looked at what had made commercial markets ineffective, and
built on it to promote hand washing with soap as the product.
What it did was that it didn't focus on germs and disease and dirt.
They use your help promoting things but they stepped outside and
looked at how hand washing could be made the acceptable lifestyle issue.
And what it did was that it built on disgust, okay.
Disgust that if you don't wash your hands with soap you have yucky stuff on your
hands that's you don't want to eat because they make you ill.
It had a TV commercial where a mum preparing food for the family gets up and
goes to the toilet and comes back and just washes her hands with water.
And as she touches the food she leaves pink stains on the food.
So you see the food with the pink stain going into the child's mouth and
this was very effective.
Of course now people are like, ooh, so that things on your hands,
you can see that you eat and it was really, really effective.
Within six months reported hand washing behavior moved from about 12% to 68%,
which was really high for a six-month initiative.
Hand washing, not washing hands with soap was seen as disgusting and yucky and
horrible.
So even in the school programs, even in the community engagement programs that
we did, we got people to see how hands were contaminated so people
could have a visual of what it was like if you didn't wash your hands with soap.
And because of the issue of the disgust factor,
they started sort of policing each other.
So if you're going to buy food from a seller, and you don't see evidence that
she washes her hands with soap, or she uses her spoon to scoop out the food for
you, people would move away from here and not buy their food.
